It's official, almost 2/3 of players are on Steam

"

鬼殺し написал:

Absolutely, complete with requisite Chinese censorship and light p2w features.

Haha, yeah, I know. That stuff isn't lost on me and I just sort of shrug my shoulders at it. If it's paying the bills it's hard to argue against it. From what I can observe PoE is really Path of China and what we're doing here is just the offshoot. Perhaps part of the fine print is to allow GGG to use us as the guinea pig. As long as Path of China is a-ok then that promise of keeping the game the same game for us could make sense. I hope so anyway.

"

鬼殺し написал:

Funny how quickly GGG's PoE has gone from 'the original, local, non-Garena' version to the TencentGGG 'international' version. Again, not something they'd announce officially but there it is.

Yep

Not 100% on topic, but at the start of each league I get at least 10 or so friends to try the game, and its easier to say: "Go to steam and press download" than tell them to go to the poe website, make an account etc.

This does however lead to me to believe that comparing steam charts on day one of play is a bit of bad way of thinking about things as the, "Burnout" try the game once players are more likely to have come from the front page of steam than anywhere else.

Sample size of one here though, don't take my word as fact.

The first month of the expansion I have the steam charts page of PoE open. I love to see the green number going up until the first month has passed...
I am weird so now give me your chromatic orbs.

Not sure if other's do this but I use steam on the first maybe second day of a league. The reason I do that is I will usually buy packs when the league starts. I do this on steam so I can get cards. After I reach all cards dropped I switch back to the main client.

I am spending money on points so I might as well get a little extra for it. Now that tencent bought ggg I don't even have to feel bad about steam getting a cut =p

OP didn't take statistics, did he

My friend on discord played with me until he got lvl 70. Updated his POE through steam (recent patch in 3.3), and he showed me a s/s that steam wiped his entire poe folder or something. He has really bad 4g internet (lives out in the sticks).

Proof: https://i.gyazo.com/bc6447c9b923947a396a07b1abfa39b7.png

Now he has to re-download it. Which will take him a few days. Not fair whatsoever, steam is cancer. Now got no one to play with.

I have both Steam and non-steam version of POE installed. Mostly play POE through Steam though.

My suspicion is that a majority of POE league players plays via Steam, and majority of Standard players play the non-steam version.

Just a gut feeling as there are no official numbers for this AFAIK.

If that is true then I am not surprised to see that 2/3 of the players are Steam players at the start of a new league due to new league hype and all.

Would be interesting to see how the numbers are towards the end of a league when player numbers on the league are low and player numbers on Standard may actually be higher than the league. If the number of non-steam players at that point would be higher then I think my gut feeling would be proven right.

Does anyone really care about numbers like this? I know I don´t, because it really doesn´t mean a great deal to me.
What I do believe though and in fact know for a fact, is that people play their specific game(s) on the very platform they actually prefer. Some prefer to play on Console, some on their Computer, some even prefer and like to play specific titles on all platforms.

I've been around since Open Beta and heard that the Steam update basically took twice as long as the PoE loader. Therefore, I never did switch over to Steam.

If that is any kind of representation, then what a shift of population to Steam says to me is that the game has had regular turnover, because it would be mostly new people there. I know that is not completely true, but it probably has some roots in truth.

I am not entirely sure I would want to know exactly how much time I spend/spent in PoE. Ignorance is bliss. I look at the hours I spent in Everquest POST-playing it as an addict (instead just playing casually solo for a while, years after originally quitting) and I am shocked.